• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2007.10a
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• pp.345-346
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• 2007

This paper deals with design of a cube-style modular robot. The modular robot can change its own form according to the working environment. Therefore it is suitable to work in the search and rescue area with the shape of snake, legged robot and humanoid robot. Each of modular unit has to install its own controller on the body and driving mechanism in order to give it mobility autonomously. And also they should attach and detach each other with docking mechanism and algorithm. Using this mechanism, they can make union, separation, recombination. The other important point is that some information of each cell should be exchanged to reconfigure their shape and to make some docking of the modular cell. In this paper we suggested a design concept of our modular robot focused on the docking mechanism of the robot.

• Fire Science and Engineering
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.109-118
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• 2015

Recently, three kinds of search robot prototypes were developed to assume the role of fire fighters for search and rescue missions in special disaster areas with high heat, smoke, toxic gases, or radioactivity. To accomplish search missions, these robots should be able to endure heat, overcome various obstacles, suppress fires, and see through dense smoke. This study investigated the heat resistance, practicality, and fire fighting capacity of these robots. The results show that the small and middle-sized robots were resistant to surrounding temperatures of $100{\sim}200^{\circ}C$, and the fire-fighter-riding robot could endure up to $500^{\circ}C$ for half an hour. The fire-fighter-riding robot showed excellent extinguishing performance on an A-10 class fire model, which was extinguished within 3 min. The robots also showed various capacities for overcoming obstacles and are expected to play an active role in various special disaster areas.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.265-272
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• 2009

IVarious driving mechanisms to adapt to uneven environment have been developed for many urban search and rescue (USAR) missions. A tracked mechanism has been widely used to maintain the stability of robot's pose and to produce large traction force on uneven terrain in this research area. However, it has a drawback of low energy efficiency due to friction force when rotating. Moreover, single tracked mechanism can be in trouble when the body gets caught with high projections, so the track doesn't contact on the ground. A transformable tracked mechanism is proposed to solve these problems. The mechanism is designed with several articulations surrounded by tracks, used to generate an attack angle when the robot comes near obstacles. The stair climbing ability of proposed robot was analyzed since stairs are one of the most difficult obstacles in USAR mission. Stair climbing process is divided into four separate static analysis phases. Design parameters are optimized according to geometric limitations from the static analysis. The proposed mechanism was produced from optimized design parameters, and demonstrated in artificially constructed uneven environment and the actual stairway.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.193-200
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• 2012

Mobility is one of the most important issues for search and rescue robots. To increase mobility for small size robot we have focused on the mechanism and algorithm inspired from centipede. In spite of small size, using many legs and flexible long body, centipede can overcome high obstacles and move in rough terrains stably. This research focused on those points and imitated their legs and body that are good for obstacle negotiation. Based on similarity of a centipede's legs and tracks, serially connected tracks are used for climbing obstacles higher than the robot's height. And a centipede perceives environments using antennae on its head instead of eyes. Inspired from that, 3 IR sensors are attached on the front, top and bottom of the first module to imitate the antenna. Using the information gotten from the sensors, the robot decides next behavior automatically. In experiments, the robot can climb up to 45 cm height vertical wall and it is 600 % of the robot's height and 58 % of the robot's length.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.558-565
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• 2011

Various robot platforms have been designed and developed to perform given tasks in a hazardous environment for surveillance, reconnaissance, search and rescue, etc. We considered a terrain-adaptive and transformable hybrid robot platform that is equipped with rapid navigation capability on flat floors and good performance in overcoming stairs or obstacles. The navigation mode transition is determined and implemented by adaptive driving mode control of the mobile robot. In order to maximize the usability of wheel-track hybrid robot platform, we propose a terrain-adaptive and user-friendly remote controller and verify the efficiency and performance through its navigation performance experiments in real and test-bed environments.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.270-277
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• 2010

Various robot platforms have been designed and developed to perform given tasks in a hazardous environment for the purpose of surveillance, reconnaissance, search and rescue, and etc. We have considered a terrain adaptive hybrid robot platform which is equipped with rapid navigation on flat floors and good performance on overcoming stairs or obstacles. Since our special consideration is posed to its flexibility for real application, we devised a design of a transformable robot structure which consists of an ordinary wheeled structure to navigate fast on flat floor and a variable tracked structure to climb stairs effectively. Especially, track arms installed in front side, rear side, and mid side are used for navigation mode transition between flatland navigation and stairs climbing. The mode transition is determined and implemented by adaptive driving mode control of mobile robot. The wheel and track hybrid mobile platform apparatus applied off-road driving mechanism for various professional service robots is verified through experiments for navigation performance in real and test-bed environment.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.620-626
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• 2019

With the development of robot technology, the expectation of autonomous mission operations has increased, and the research on robot control architectures and mission planners has continued. A scalable and robust control architecture is required for unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) to perform a variety of tasks, such as surveillance, reconnaissance, and search and rescue operations, in unstructured and time-varying maritime environments. In this paper, we propose a robot control architecture along with a new utility function that can be extended to various applications for USVs. Also, an additional structure is proposed to reflect the operator's command and improve the performance of the autonomous mission. The proposed architecture was developed using a robot operating system (ROS), and the performance and feasibility of the architecture were verified through simulations.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2005.06a
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• pp.806-811
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• 2005

The robot to search and rescue is used in narrow space where human cannot approach. In case of this robot, it can overcome obstacles such as wrecks or stairs etc. Also, this robot can do various locomotion for each object. In this reason, an articulated robot has advantages comparing with one module robot. However, the existing articulated robot has limits to overcome vertical passages. For expanding contacted territory of robot, a novel mechanism is demanded. In this paper, the novel mechanism of articulated mobile robot is designed for moving level ground and vertical passages. This paper proposes to change wheel alignment. The robot needs two important motions for passing vertical passages like pipe. One is a motion to press wheels at wall for not falling into gravity direction. The other is a motion that wheels contact a vertical direction of wall's tangential direction for reducing loss of force. The mechanism of the robot focused that two motions can be acted to use just one motor. Length of each link of robot is optimized that wheels contact a vertical direction of wall's tangential direction through kinematic modeling of each link. The force of pressing wall of robot is calculated through dynamic modeling. This robot composes four modules. This mechanism is confirmed by dynamic simulation using ADAMS program. The articulated mobile robot is elaborated based on the results of kinematic modeling and dynamic simulation.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.296-311
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• 2007

Mobile multi-robot teams are useful in many critical applications such as search and rescue. Explicit communication among robots in such mobile multi-robot teams is useful for the coordination of such teams as well as exchanging data. Since many applications for mobile robots involve scenarios in which communication infrastructure may be damaged or unavailable, mobile robot teams frequently need to communicate with each other via ad hoc networking. In such scenarios, low-overhead and energy-efficient routing protocols for delivering messages among robots are a key requirement. Two important primitives for communication are essential for enabling a wide variety of mobile robot applications. First, unicast communication (between two robots) needs to be provided to enable coordination and data exchange. Second, in many applications, group communication is required for flexible control, organization, and management of the mobile robots. Multicast provides a bandwidth-efficient communication method between a source and a group of robots. In this paper, we first propose and evaluate two unicast routing protocols tailored for use in ad hoc networks formed by mobile multi-robot teams: Mobile robot distance vector (MRDV) and mobile robot source routing (MRSR). Both protocols exploit the unique mobility characteristics of mobile robot networks to perform efficient routing. Our simulation study show that both MRDV and MRSR incur lower overhead while operating in mobile robot networks when compared to traditional mobile ad hoc network routing protocols such as DSR and AODV. We then propose and evaluate an efficient multicast protocol mobile robot mesh multicast (MRMM) for deployment in mobile robot networks. MRMM exploits the fact that mobile robots know what velocity they are instructed to move at and for what distance in building a long lifetime sparse mesh for group communication that is more efficient. Our results show that MRMM provides an efficient group communication mechanism that can potentially be used in many mobile robot application scenarios.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.57-64
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• 2022

If the inside of a building collapses due to a disaster such as fire, collapse, or natural disaster, the physical security inside the building is likely to become ineffective. Here, physical security is needed to minimize the human casualties and physical damages in the collapsed building. Therefore, this paper proposes an algorithm to minimize the damage in a disaster situation by fusing existing research that detects obstacles and collapsed areas in the building and a deep learning-based object detection algorithm that minimizes human casualties. The existing research uses a single camera to determine whether the corridor environment in which the robot is currently located has collapsed and detects obstacles that interfere with the search and rescue operation. Here, objects inside the collapsed building have irregular shapes due to the debris or collapse of the building, and they are classified and detected as obstacles. We also propose a method to detect rescue requesters-the most important resource in the disaster situation-and minimize human casualties. To this end, we collected open-source disaster images and image data of disaster situations and calculated the accuracy of detecting rescue requesters in disaster situations through various deep learning-based object detection algorithms. In this study, as a result of analyzing the algorithms that detect rescue requesters in disaster situations, we have found that the YOLOv4 algorithm has an accuracy of 0.94, proving that it is most suitable for use in actual disaster situations. This paper will be helpful for performing efficient search and rescue in disaster situations and achieving a high level of physical security, even in collapsed buildings.